Search Jobs
Employer Directory
Career Articles
For NJTC Employers

Article: Ted Ko, director of content development at flyswat

Article Group List / Career Change / Ted Ko, director of content development at flyswat

Ted Ko, director of content development at flyswat

Ted went from MIT into a high-pressured startup.  Here's his story.

Vault.com: Tell us a little about your background.
Ted Ko: I went to MIT, where I got a Bachelor's in Computer Science and then a Masters in '95.  After that I was working at the technology lab arm of Pacific Bell.  It was actually a separate 30-person sister company.  I was there for about a year and a half doing advanced tech research.  After that I went to a small health care software company, working on electronic insurance claims.  I did that for a little over a year, then helped start flyswat in the middle of '98.  I came on full-time near the end of the year.

V: How did you get into working in the Internet?
TK: Well, I was interested in working for a small company after having worked for a large one, although the software company I was at was small.  But it was really more by chance.  The guy who came up with the idea for flyswat was the fraternity brother of my roommate.  I had been doing more backend software work, and I could tell [flyswat] was a good idea that would give me the opportunity to do more than that.

V: What did you do to prepare yourself to work for a startup?
TK: Nothing specific.  None of us were doing anything specifically Internet-related [before], but we assumed we could pick it up as we went along.

V: So you were sort of flying by the seat of your pants early on.
TK: Oh yes.  Two of the founders had to quit their jobs - actually, one of them quit law school - and one of them went on nothing for about the first six months.  I came on half-time until the time we got our seed money, and then switched over.

V: Aside from the money, was it hard to make that switch?
TK: It was very smooth.  It was a bad time to be leaving, but I was close to my boss.  So I went on half-time with the assumption that I could go back if we didn't get funding [for flyswat].  It all worked out very well.

~ V: And you moved right into your current role?
TK: We have three main engineering teams here, known as Client, Server, and Content.  The first people here became directors of those teams [and of non-engineering teams].  I direct the Content team, which builds and manages our big main database.  It was two of us when we started; now there are five of us.

V: So what exactly does your job entail?
TK: It's a mix.  I'm managing the activities of the group, but we haven't gotten to the point where I can just be managing [and not doing anything else].  Our group is responsible for the destinations that the flyswat links take you to.  I gather some of that content myself - or rather, I write software that gathers content from the Web.

I also have to coordinate with the rest of the company, by dealing with the content we need to support our partnerships.  I'm not typically talking with our partners though - the business development people do that, unless there's a technical issue.  Then there are our affiliate programs.  I manage those, keeping track of traffic and making sure our links are appropriately tracked.

V: Sounds like you've got all the work you can handle.
TK: As we've gotten bigger, it has eased up a bit.  A couple of months ago, I was working 12-14 hours every weekday - now its like that three days of the week.  [Back then] I'd be in between 8 and 9, and out between 11 and 12.  Plus about 5 to 6 hours each weekend day.  We get decent breaks, but it's [still] about 70-80 hours a week.  That's pretty typical for people in my position though.

V: Working all those hours, how does your pay stack up?
TK: Now that we've finished our first round of financing in April and are working on the second round, my pay is pretty close to market level.  It was zero, then probably about one-third of market up until the first round, and now it's close to 100 percent.  I haven't gone out and benchmarked, but I get the feeling I'm pretty darn close.  We're not giving out huge chunks of equity anymore [for new employees], but we're now offering very competitive pay.

~ V: Switching gears a bit, what skills would someone interested in your job need?
TK: You need a good sense of system design-level thinking.  You have to understand a lot of design concepts for software - making sure it's manageable and usable so a decent number of people can be working on it. 

A person also needs to have a lot of software architecture ideas.  That comes from hands-on software development experience.  General management skills too.  I have a group of smart, fairly inexperienced people, so having managed a team and delivered a product [in the past] is important.  You also need to do some big-picture thinking.  It helps being up on what's going on in the industry, so you are able to translate that and prioritize.

V: You're currently a Director, managing a five-person group.  What's the next step in the typical career path?
TK: After being in my position for awhile, it's either moving into managing larger groups of people, like a whole division.  It would be a director level at a larger company like Sun or IBM.  [In that position], you're looking more at the strategic side of things.

V: Finally, what do you think people should know about moving into the Internet industry?
TK: Things move really, really fast.  You have to be able to constantly learn things to stay on top of it.  You can't spend four months training and then move into a small assignment.  Understand where you best fit.  Once a startup gets to a certain point, they're not going to hire you just because you're smart.  So you have to be clear about what you can do.